Webhost issues

I'm using myhosting.com and I'm going to document the problems I've experienced.

1) 13 March 2012 @GMT+8 11:00am to 3:00pm, network problem. Both my site and myhosting.com display a gateway timeout. I contacted myhosting.com and they admited there was a problem with it. This is a second time I experience this and it happen around the same time. I suspect that they were doing some maintenance.

A 'screwup' Ad

Once in a while, an Ad will screw up my blog causing some weird random problems. Here is the problem I encountered.

1) Ad on the first right side column. Causing both my right side column and footer to 'vanish'.

I'll be documenting future problems here.

The importance of backup

I am not talking only about backing up to your computer. I'm talking about backing up your computer to another location.

My HDD crashed and all my backups from my past blogs are totally gone. Time to invest on a home NAS. Lost data is going to set me back on my blog progression.

A more efficient way to track my banner ad?

In my previous post, I use a simple way of tracking my banner ad - that is to check if the number of referrals went up. However, this may not be very accurate. Also, my advertiser inform me that he would prefer that I give him a html code. That's when I found ClixTrac. The free service should be good enough for me.

Track clicks on each banner or link for up to 7 days or 100 clicks.

Track views/impressions on each banner for up to 7 days or 500 impressions.

I wonder if it will still work after 7 days or 100 clicks. Only one way to find out.

Update:
Start Date: 01-29-2012 Expires: 02-05-2012
I realize that  there is a time stamp in my Ad. Meaning, it will no longer be free after 7 days.

Back to the drawing board again.

Update 30 Jan 2012
There ain't any free service out there and it's not worthwhile to subscribe to services like ClixTrac and ClickMeter to track just one ad. I will stick to my original simple tracking.

Ad Campaign

It's not my first ad campaign but it will be the first that I am going to track properly. This blog is quite popular and I'm thankful that the owner is kind enough to allow me to advertise my site for a nominal fee. I am going to try it out for three months first before deciding to continue for the rest of the year.

Here's the results before the ads went live.

	Jun-11	Jul-11	Aug-11	Sep-11	Nov-11	Dec-11	Jan-12	Feb-12	Mar-12	Apr-12
Referral Visits	909	1,045	1,227	590	526	471	391
All traffic	19,500	19,408	20,681	17,797	17,652	17,807	23,032
%	4.66%	5.38%	5.93%	3.32%	2.98%	2.65%	1.70%

It will be interesting to find out if the total referral visits will increase and how much does it contribute to the overall traffic.

Increasing my feedburner email subscribers - an unexpected result

Have you ever notice those side bar tabs on some of the blogs? They are useful for two purpose

1) Reduce the clatter of having additional widgets on your side-bar
2) Increase visibility or at least I hope it would do.

There are a couple of plugins available and I decided to use Share and Follow plugin because of its popularity. It's basically a plugin to share your blog using all the various social media available. As my focus is on increasing my feedburner email subscribers, I tweaked it to link it to a page on my site instead of directly to a social media portal.  The results were astonishing. Within three days, my feedburner subscribers jump from 801 to 874. However, upon further investigation, my email subscriber only increase by one. It would seem that most are not comfortable in subscribing via email and are subscribing via readers. I am particular on this and consider the implementation a success.

I will let it run for another week or two, or until I reach the magical 1K subscribers. After which will be Facebook.

ERROR: This email is already registered, please choose another one.

Trying to figure out which account is using this email so that I can update my Gravatar. Realised I can sort by email but I got the error message above.

Creating new users in WordPress with the same email account is no longer possible but there is a little trick:
There is a trick that works with Gmail (and possibly other email providers) to let you use one email address as though it were several different addresses. Gmail lets you add “+something” to your mailbox name and still get your mail. For example, joe@gmail.com and joe+wordpress@gmail.com and joe+secretblog@gmail.com each look like different addresses to our system but they all route mail to the same inbox: joe@gmail.com.

Source: http://en.support.wordpress.com/email-address/